19.06, 12:15-1:45pm (online)

Anna Krzywoszynska (History, Culture and Communication Studies, University of Oulu)

Why we need a more-than-human agricultural knowledge and what gets in the way

Agriculture is the space on interdependency per excellence, a significant site of negotiation between  human and more-than-human entities. However, as in other areas of ‘natural resource management’, the negotiation gave place to control (or illusion of control).  The ecological consequences of this have been such that agriculture has become one of the major drivers of planetary boundaries overshoot. Currently, various major policies in the EU, the UK, and in other areas are seeking to shift the focus in agriculture from productivism and extraction and towards provision of ‘ecosystem goods’. In this shift, however, the logic of control, and its associated epistemologies and ontologies of quantification and calculability, are retained – and not only by the ‘external’ governance actors, but also “internally”, in the self-governance of farmers. What may it mean, instead, to engender a more-than-human agricultural knowledge? Most importantly, considering the pervasiveness of calculability and control, what may be the forms of knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing which would make more-than-human agricultural knowledge socially legitimate and desirable by the farming populations? In this talk I discuss these issues especially as pertains to debates around soils and soil health/sustainability.